Reinforced security, trustworthy hosting resources, and expanded flexibility are chief points for developers to choose Virtual Private Servers (VPS) when launching and maintaining a functional website. Today we are going to explore 3 types of elastic VPS hosting available in Jelastic Cloud, as well as find out which type of Virtual Private Server will meet your specific requirements. 

Just to recall what is Virtual Private Server (VPS) – an individual virtual machine, which runs on the software of the same physical hardware node and appears to be a functional equivalent of a separate physical computer. Together with full isolation and focus on your particular needs, VPS ensures high-level privacy and can be configured to run server software for your services and applications hosting.

Main features:

• insulation – each given VPS represents a completely independent instance and can’t be influenced by any other account on the hardware
• full control – it is possible to manage your virtual machine in any preferred way due to the provided root permissions
• scalability – the server can be automatically scaled vertically and horizontally by setting the resource limits and specific triggers within Jelastic platform
• cost effectiveness – VPS hosting is a relatively cheap web hosting service (comparing to the cost of purchase and maintenance of a real dedicated physical server).

Jelastic delivers Virtual Private Server by means of pre-configured certified stack templates on top of 3 operating systems – CentOS, Ubuntu and Windows.

Virtual Private Servers Overview

CentOS (Community ENTerprise Operating System) is an absolutely free and community-driven project, with open source code delivered from RHEL Linux distribution.

Due to continuous community contribution, CentOS offers enterprise-level stability strengthened by robust performance and represents a reliable, low-maintenance, secure option for running virtual private servers.

Ubuntu appears to be one of the most popular operating systems for running virtual private servers inside the Cloud. Being built over the Debian Linux distribution, Ubuntu shares its commitment to principles of open-source software and offers continually developing solutions with agile, secure and versatile performance capabilities.

Windows Server OS (2012 and optionally 2008 R2 versions are provided) allows you to run any Windows-based software on your virtual machine with support of popular tools and technologies: ASP.NET, PHP, SQL, Visual Studio, Active Directory, etc.

Due to the fact that Windows OS is a proprietary software and can’t be distributed freely (i.e. requires the license to be applied to the platform), you can be charged for using such containers (regardless of whether it’s running or stopped). The availability and the price of Windows hosting services depend on your hosting provider’s settings.

Installation

Now we will show you how easy it is to install your own VPS in the Jelastic cloud.

1. Firstly, log in to your Jelastic account and access environment topology wizard.

2. Herein, click on the VPS section at the bottom left corner and choose the needed VPS (Ubuntu 16.04 in our example) from the expandable options list.

Specify cloudlet limits for this node, scale it out (if required), select the preferred region (if several of them are available), type the name of the environment and click on Create.

3. In a couple of minutes, your new environment with the chosen virtual server will appear at the dashboard. You’ll also receive an email notification with its administration data (i.e. login / password credentials, attached Public IP and access URL).

And voila – now your own virtual private server is up and running!

Elastic VPS Scaling

Flexibility of VPS hosting in Jelastic Cloud is achieved due to automatic scaling, both vertical and horizontal, that is easily tuned during creating and configuring environment topology.

Automatic vertical scaling allows to choose your scalability limits with the appropriate settings, whilst make your hosting costs meet your budget and at the same time prevent outages during unexpectedly load spikes. The system will automatically provide the server with the required resources due to the load.

To scale your environment, simply increase/decrease the maximum number of available resources (cloudlets), moving the cloudlet sliders in the Vertical Scaling section.

Jelastic horizontal scaling functionality allows to easily adjust the number of servers in your environment using the appropriate “-” and “+” buttons. Operating several same-type nodes in confines of a single environment highly increases its management capacities – all of them can be simultaneously configured, reset to get new passwords, inspected for logs and statistics, restarted etc.

All the newly added VPS instances will clone the master node (i.e. the initially created container) with all its configurations. However, each node will have its own hostname and administration data, delivered via the corresponding emails. These are going to be independent servers that are able to handle separate applications.

Make sure to Apply changes you’ve made.

Access Your VPS

You can apply some basic settings to your VPS instance right via dashboard UI with a set of inbuilt tools, provided by Jelastic.

In case you want to implement more complicated configurations, simply access your VPS using:

• for CentOS and Ubuntu
  • Jelastic SSH Gate
  • Public IP address

• for CentOS
  • embedded web-based SSH client

• for Windows VPS
  • remote desktop protocol (RDP)

Use Cases

To see how you can use your VPS in practice and make some widely-used configurations, review the following tutorials:

• Java Console Application with CentOS VPS. Installing a sample of Java console application to your СentOS virtual private server and checking its operability.
• Setting Mail Server Inside CentOS VPS. Integration of mail server to your virtual private machine, accessing the required container over SSH protocol and using the preferable connection flow.
• Setting Windows VPS Roles and Features via Server Manager. Basic functionality of inbuilt Server Manager for configuring Windows VPS.

Conclusion

VPS provides developers with the advanced solution to run large scaled applications and ensures their simple administration at the same time. That’s why VPS hosting becomes the preferred choice of both inexperienced and advanced users, being able to suit anybody’s needs.

Now when you’ve learned everything about Elastic VPS in Jelastic, try now to install, scale and access one of them within the cloud.